Jay watched silently from the other side of the mushroom-covered desert as the helpless glade deer was tangled up by the hanging red fruit of the mushrooms - though he was mostly focused on the large grey predator chasing it.
“It could easily catch the deer now… so why doesn’t it want to touch the sand?”
Jay wondered, but soon had an answer.
Slowly, the deer was lifted into the air - the tendrils attached to the fruit were being reeled into the mushroom caps.
The deer whined as it was stretched and pulled tight between two of the mushroom caps, and as its body was pulled it began to make pitiful noises which sent shivers up Jay's spine, no longer even sounding like a deer.
Jay watched on in horror as the worst slowly happened before his eyes. Some animals were barbaric but this was something else, it was uncaring brutality.
Strangely... a part of him, a deep dark part within the depths of his mind... almost seemed to be excited.
Jay shivered, pushing the strange excited feeling deeper, suppressing it before it grew and could possibly get him to agree with it.
“This could have been my fate.” he clenched his jaw.
The deer squired as it was pulled tighter, and almost seemed to spasm for a moment, but something suddenly popped and dislocated under its fur.
Next, the fur was ripped open, slowly and mercilessly. The deer was probably - hopefully - dead by now, so it would have been spared from this pain.
After each mushroom cap had ripped the deer into two parts, it tucked the flesh under its cap.
The mushrooms them folded back up and went back under the sand.
Finally, silence. The beast stared at the side of the forest and Jay just stood there watching from the other side of the desert.
He could only stand in awe as he looked at the numerous mushrooms covering the whole desert for as far as he could see.
“How many animals died to make a field this big…” he had a stern look as he gazed at them.
The large grey beast did a small grunt and returned to the forest. It seemed this had happened many times before and was simply used to it.
“Thankfully it didn’t notice me… though there is always a chance that it pretended not to notice me. It could simply be watching me from the depth of the forest.” he thought, still looking for any signs of moment.
“Maybe I'm just being paranoid...” he shrugged, “anyway, time to test the red fruit.” he added.
“Well, who wants to go first?” Jay looked around at his skeletons.
Of course, a sly smile came across his face as he looked towards Sweeper.
Before sending Sweeper off into the mushroom field, Jay made sure to take its weapon from it. He didn’t want to waste another.
“Go.” he smiled.
After losing it weapon, Sweeper seemed to lower its head as it entered the field - though Jay didn’t leave it without options: he gave it a small stick which he snapped off a small withered bush.
As Sweeper drew closer to the first mushroom it poked one of the red fruits with the stick it was given.
Strangely the red fruit bounced harmlessly off the stick.
“Odd…” Jay thought, “so maybe it can sense living from non-living?”
Seeing no reaction, Sweeper then poked it with its undead bone finger.
Jay couldn’t tell before, but the fruit actually wasn’t sticky - it actually seemed to explode and cover whatever touched it in a red ooze which then seemed to grow rapidly grow across the bone finger, travelling up the hand and even reaching to the wrist of the skeleton.
“Wow, no wonder the deer couldn’t escape.” Jay thought as he watched it.
Jay had Sweeper try to slash at the tendril connecting to the fruit, but every time it swiped, it was like it slid across the tendrils harmlessly.
Jay pragmatically sent Handy in to chop off Sweeper's hand. Despite having hundreds of thousands of skeletons, he didn’t want to foolishly waste resources; something felt wrong about it.
“Ironically, when I was a butcher, I would save the meat and discard the bones…” Jay thought, as he watched Sweeper's hand getting chopped off with a smile.
Soon though, his mind drifted to why he got a class at all and how he had to flee Losla for his life.
He silently stared into the wilderness as he looked over the desert, “The wilderness won’t hold me forever. I will be back some day…” he promised himself.
Despite the skeleton hand being detached, the mushroom soon vanished under the soil again, claiming its worthless prize.
“Hmm, but sticks are dead and so are bones. I don’t see the difference…” Jay wondered, “maybe the skeletons have a type of life force?”
For some reason, the mushroom fruit had no interest in the wooden stick.
“Okay, test number two.” Jay said.
Sweeper didn’t nod, but it accepted its orders as it rushed over the the mushrooms and stuck its vambrace onto one of the hanging red fruits.
Similarly to before, it attached and grew onto the piece of the spectral armour in an erratic burst of life.
“So armour doesn’t block it…? Somehow it senses through the armour.”
Again, Sweeper had more of its arm chopped off, and was now a one-armed skeleton.
Jay had it pick up a nearby rock and touch a red fruit to it, but there was no reaction.
“Hmm…” Jay couldn’t really make sense of it.
The desert wrapped around the tip of the mountain range and kept going for a thousand meters, and as he was at the tip, he could have just walked around it as well - however, after seeing the large grey beast he decided to look for some other options.
As he looked along the mountain range, the mountains seemed to go on forever, as if they were an ancient mega wall designed to keep armies of giants out, and this strange slender desert followed along the side of it, seeming to go on forever too.
“While the perrton wolves were easy to kill, that didn’t mean that the grey beast would be easy…”
“It seems like the mountain range and the desert mushrooms act like natural barriers against whatever beasts are in these forests, and must have been what made Losla safe for so long…”
Jay gloomily stared into the dark forest.
“So basically, there’s no telling what lies on the other side…” he continued to gaze into the dark forest.
It seemed relatively calm, even peaceful, but in Jay's mind it felt like he was standing on the edge of an abyss and was about to jump in; anything could be waiting on the other side.
Although it was quiet, he now felt like he stood out like a beacon and was probably even being watched by things in the forest at this very moment.
There was no telling what level the beasts beyond the desert could be... or even if they were simple beasts at all.
There were other stronger nations which could have wiped Astrata out and made humans extinct, but they had to spend most of their military resources dedicated to holding back wild beasts, among other creatures imbued with dark magic or mana.
Still, Astrata was not free from the endless assault of unknown creatures, ever wandering out of the wilds. There were even areas within Astrata called dead zones, where creatures claimed land, and were either too powerful to remove or simply not worth their time.
As Jay looked across the desert, he believed that he had until nightfall to make a choice, as it seemed that the mushroom retracted at night time.
Sure, crossing the desert would be easy but he wanted to test out the strength of the beasts on the other side before making the journey.
He was stepping into the unknown after all.
As Jay looked around and thought about what to do, he noticed something under the mushrooms, moving in the sand.
They were hard to see at first, but it seemed that there were some creatures lurking beneath the surface of the sand.
Small bumps of sand rolled backwards and forwards between a crack in some rocks near the edge of the desert and the mushrooms.
Looking closely, Jay saw that a small red fruit would be periodically plucked off and pulled under the sand before whatever it was picking them would slip back under the sand and enter the small crack between some rocks, leaving behind only a slight impression in the sand.
“Hmm... they can pick the fruit?” Jay’s lips curled as he watched these underground creatures, smelling an opportunity.
